Cool strings: Kanon Wakeshima and Emilie Autumn

Kanon Wakeshima has a cool cello and voice song, taken from the soundtrack of an anime, of course, but still, a pretty cool song: Kanon Wakeshima - Suna No Oshiro




Emilie Autumn
has some really nice instrumental songs, like the one I put here, and some nice voice songs. Unfortunately I don't like the instrumentation of the voice songs. I am still looking for a perfect crazy electric violin and voice song, but it may be that singing and playing the violin is impossible or at least too difficult. So here is Emilie Autumn - Manic Depression:

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Unlimited unpolluting cheap gasoline?

It appears that a British project, secretly conducted by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, has produced a method of encapsulating hydrogen into microparticles of porous material. The result is something that acts like a liquid, burns like hydrogen and can be used inside normal cars without any engine modification. The price they propose is 1.5$ per gallon, which is 0.396$ per liter or 0.2915 euros. What is cool about it is that they don't need to extract any resource in order to produce this miracle fuel.

Could THIS be the end of oil? Frankly I am amazed that this news reached me and not the one about Stephen Bennington found dead in a ditch somewhere. I can only hope that the secrecy of the project paid off and that the guys at Cella Energy have really managed to find the solution while under the radar of Big Oil. Or maybe it is simply the time in which the dependency on oil has become a bigger threat to national security than the lack of funding coming from oil companies.

Link to the original news: Breakthrough promises $1.50 per galon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions

Update: I may have spoken too soon. A NewScientist article explains the process in a slightly different light. The beads do store hydrogen, but they must be heated in order to release that hydrogen, then the hydrogen would be used in fuel cells. That is at odds with the idea that you can use it as gasoline in a petrol tank car. Oh, well, I hope they get it right someday.

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Religious texts (List of Wikipedia)

Another interesting List of Wikipedia is the list of religious texts. It's a medium sized list, although I suspect it is not nearly complete and that some of the works there are pretty big.

I am not much on religion, but I wonder what one would come to think of if presented with all the texts in the list, exposed to them without any cultural bias. Would some sort of distilation of the concept of religion emerge from it, or would everybody just choose a religion they feel more comfortable with? Or maybe they would write their own religious texts.

When I think about it, I can't help but compare it with the emergence of certain genres in fiction, like alien invasion sci-fi or comic book super heroes. First there are some original authors that come up with an idea. The idea is well liked, bought and distributed. It becomes well known so that other people start making work of their own that is inspired by that. It's almost organic, with reproduction, mutation, cross breeding and extinction. However, the integrity of religions is mostly enforced by communities of people that insist on changing nothing. They stop evolution, but also protect against extinction. Is stagnation the hallmark of religion or is it the stability that it provides in a world in continuous flux of change?

I will tell you this: I like evolution. And I mean it in the most general sense, not only the Darwinian one. I find it ironic that in my mind religion is the opposite of evolution. Or maybe that's a cultural bias. Hmm...

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Shigurui, one of the most beautiful manga/anime I've seen

The Shigurui (Death Frenzy) manga is now complete. The beautifully terrible story of two exceptional samurai in a world of politics, betrayal and cultural conditioning, locked in absolute rivalry, has ended with the 84th chapter, Pure Crimson. There is an anime with the same subject, I've also seen it and it is really great, even if it stops dead after 11 episodes. I actually recommend to watch the anime and then continue with the chapters in the manga, in order to understand better the feeling of the story. It must be said that the translation from a book written by a war veteran to a graphic novel by a mangaka 58 years his young and then translated to TV anime has not lost, but gained insight and emotion.

One can read the entire manga at MangaFox.

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List of Misconceptions!

I've never thought to check if there is such a list on the Internet, but apparently it is, as described in the xkcd comic. Good thing I at least read that! Wikipedia's List of common misconceptions is a very interesting read, many of the myths described there being reedited regularly through the media without them actually being true! So, get reading.

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How to hide inherited members on MSDN pages

If you are like me, you often google a .Net class and find it at MSDN. Also, since you want the page to load quickly and get you the information you need, you probably selected the Lightweight view on MSDN. If you haven't, you should :) Anyway, a problem with MSDN is that it shows you every possible member of the class, which is especially annoying with WPF classes as they inherit from FrameworkElement that has a gazillion events. Wouldn't it be great if one could hide the inherited members from an MSDN page?

At first I thought I would parse the content of each row and detect the (Inherited from string, but it appears it is even simpler: table row elements have a data attribute that (if the member is inherited) contains the word inherited. Probably someone at MSDN wanted to make the same thing as me, but forgot to implement it (at least on the lightweight view). The javascript is simple enough:

var trs=document.getElementsByTagName('tr');
var l=trs.length;
for (var i=0; i<l; i++) {
  var tr=trs[i];
  var data=tr.getAttribute('data');
  if (!data||data.indexOf('inherited')==-1) continue;
  tr.style.display=tr.style.display=='none'?'':'none';
}

You probably wonder why I haven't used jQuery. It is because I want it to work in a javascript: url so I can put it in a bookmark! Just as with the Firebug bookmark you need to manually create a bookmark in the Favorites folder (or to add any page as a favorite, then edit its URL) in Internet Explorer or to simply add a bookmark in the browser in Chrome and Firefox and paste the one line script. To make it easier, I will write them both here. The content of the .url favorite file:

[DEFAULT]
BASEURL=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/
[InternetShortcut]
URL=javascript:var trs=document.getElementsByTagName('tr');var l=trs.length;for (var i=0; i<l; i++) {  var tr=trs[i];  var data=tr.getAttribute('data');  if (data&&data.indexOf('inherited')>-1)  tr.style.display=tr.style.display=='none'?'':'none'; }; void(0);
IDList=
IconFile=http://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico
IconIndex=1
[{000214A0-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]
Prop3=19,2

and the javascript line to use in other browsers:

javascript:var trs=document.getElementsByTagName('tr');var l=trs.length;for (var i=0; i<l; i++) {  var tr=trs[i];  var data=tr.getAttribute('data');  if (data&&data.indexOf('inherited')>-1)  tr.style.display=tr.style.display=='none'?'':'none'; }; void(0);

.

Happy coding!

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Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay

The fifth book in the Dexter Morgan series by Jeff Lindsay, Dexter is Delicious is slightly better written than the first four, but also less credible. The main character is torn between his Dark Passanger and the desire to love and protect his newly born child. He thus decides to "become human" in the worst possible moment. His brother Brian, who attempted to kill Dexter's adoption sister Deborah, also makes an appearance. The bad guys in the story are a cannibal ring and they are quite the gourmet, requiring Dexter as a main course.

The problem with this book, apart from the general Dexter Morgan hard to swallow leaps of faith, is that the Dark Passenger is pushed back, as Dexter gets in tough with his parental instincts. For me, at least, Dark-Dexter was the main character and the mischievous whispers of his inner demon were the delight of the series. If I would want to know people having kids and loving their pinkness I would read something else entirely.

I will continue to follow the series, but I can't help feeling a little dissappointed every time I read one of the books in the series. With such a wonderful subject, the possibilities are limitless and a great deal of potential wasted.

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